Michael Phillips

"Riddick" -- the third sci-fi film to star Vin Diesel as the interplanetary antihero of the same name -- arrives nine years after its predecessor, "The Chronicles of Riddick," and 13 years after the original, "Pitch Black." Unfortunately for Diesel and series writer-director David Twohy, "Riddick" hasn't exactly returned to a hero's welcome. For every film critic who finds it a fun, gory slice of genre entertainment, there's another who finds it stale and one-dimensional. In the Los Angeles Times, for example, Michael Phillips calls "Riddick" "extremely violent, cleverly managed fun." He explains, "This is...

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"Riddick" -- the third sci-fi film to star Vin Diesel as the interplanetary antihero of the same name -- arrives nine years after its predecessor, "The Chronicles of Riddick," and 13 years after the original, "Pitch Black."...

Amid a summer in which Earth has been decimated by an alien intelligence, abandoned by humanity, overrun by zombies and beset by demons, "Pacific Rim" introduces yet another threat: kaiju -- giant, city-smashing monsters from the deep. Mankind's...

Roger Ebert, the Pulitzer Prize-winning movie critic whose gladiatorial "thumbs-up, thumbs-down" assessments turned film reviewing into a television sport and whose passion for independent film helped introduce a new generation of filmmakers...

Writer-director Rod Lurie's bird-brained remake of "Straw Dogs" doesn't work on its own terms, and it can't hold a candle to the unruly, unstable merits of Sam Peckinpah's 1971 original. It's miscast, barely functional in terms of technique,...

When the comedy "Any Wednesday" opened on Broadway in 1964 Walter Kerr reviewed a then-unknown Gene Hackman and noted, memorably, the actor's "wonderfully light-footed habit of stepping off a joke before it begins to complain." Isn't...